Long before Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, many were predicting it would take a big bite out of Apple's iPad market. Now that Amazon has revealed details about the Kindle Fire, the comparisons between it and the iPad continue. Jim Cheshire gives you all the details.

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Long before Amazon announced the Kindle Fire, many were predicting it would take a big bite out of Apple's iPad market. Now that Amazon has revealed details about the Kindle Fire, the comparisons between it and the iPad continue. Some believe that the Kindle Fire represents serious competition, while others predict it will be next in a long line of tablet computers killed off by the reigning iPad. In fact, regardless of how well the Kindle Fire does versus the iPad, it is uniquely positioned to set the tablet landscape ablaze.

When Amazon released the Kindle in 2007, eBook readers were relatively new. Sony and others had been producing eBook readers for several years, but none of them was even marginally successful. Amazon brought something new to eBook readers: back-end services. The success of the Amazon Kindle is due to the Kindle Store and Amazon's Whispernet service, which allows users to store purchased eBooks on Amazon's network and access them on any device.

How well has that worked out for Amazon? Despite the naysayers predicting that the Kindle would fail, the Kindle outsells all the other millions of items on Amazon's site. You do the math.

The Kindle Fire is set to do the same thing for the tablet that the Kindle did for eBook readers. Unlike other tablets, the Kindle Fire is almost exclusively a content-consumption device powered by Amazon services. If you shop at Amazon, you are already a consumer of Amazon services-but you might not be aware of the wide assortment of services that Amazon offers, all of which drive the Kindle Fire experience.

Amazon Instant Video

Amazon Instant Video offers more than 100,000 movies and television shows, all of which can be streamed over WiFi to the Kindle Fire. You won't find movies that are currently in the theater (blame the movie companies for that), but you will find plenty of recent movies, and episodes of your favorite television shows are available soon after they air on television, often by the next day. At less than two dollars per episode (a dollar more if you want HD), Amazon Instant Video is a great way to catch up on a series or to grab a missed episode.

The Kindle Fire provides seamless access to Amazon's movie and TV video collection, and Amazon makes it easy for you to start watching on one device (your TV, for example) and finish watching on another device such as the Kindle Fire.

In a move to kick it up a notch, Kindle Fire owners will receive a free year of Amazon Prime membership, a $79 value. Amazon Prime gives you free two-day shipping on any item shipped by Amazon, and it lets you stream thousands of movies and TV shows free to your Kindle Fire.

The inclusion of Amazon Prime with the Kindle Fire is a brilliant move by Amazon because it will make it that much more enticing for consumers to use more of Amazon's services and to buy more from its online store.